OSTIblog Posts by Nena Moss

OSTI and Social Media: A Great Way to “Share” DOE STI

Published on Jul 08, 2014

OSTI's mission is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the public. As part of this commitment to America’s science and technology future, we strive to place information in consumers’ hands, specifically, at their fingertips. Rapidly changing technology and increasing demands from smartphone-toting consumers drive new paths to DOE research using new social media tools.

DOE supports the use of social media as an avenue to uphold “open government principles of transparency, participation and collaboration”, expand the conversation on energy issues, and communicate with the rising/next generation of researchers. OSTI regularly shares information through interactive and user-driven social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. OSTI makes social media posts not only about our scientific and technical information (STI) collections and search tools, but also retweets and shares STI-related posts from other DOE program offices and across the 17 DOE national laboratories.

This is not just a one-way exchange. Digital engagement creates value, not only as OSTI reaches out to users but as users link back to DOE R&D in OSTI’s electronic library. For example, the OSTI document Technology of mirror machines: LLL facilities for magnetic mirror fusion experiments  became more visible via a link from a photo posted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Flickr, an image and video social media site. Links back to OSTI documents are found in many places on the Web because of our large collection of DOE...